The joy of giving

I guess it seems strange to some (given the reactions I've gotten from friends and family), but I've dreamed of volunteering for years. When I was working nearly 11-hour days during the career phase of my life, I just didn't have it in me to give time to others at the end of the day, and my weekends were the only free time I had, so they were too precious to give up on an ongoing basis. So, when I did volunteer work during my that time, it was a few hours here, a one-day event there, but it wasn't the kind of volunteering I wanted to do. That would have to wait for retirement.

I've now been retired for 1 1/2 years. In that time, I've given of my time by answering phones for the State welfare office, fundraising for an animal sanctuary, attending meetings of an emergency preparedness organization, reading to preschool children and interviewing and writing profiles of people doing good works for a volunteer- and over-50-focused website. I've gone from working 10-11 hours a day to working 10-11 hours a week (at most). My goal was to find a balance between being of service and being retired--and that's just what I've done.

I've been reading to preschool children at a Head Start school for nearly a year now. Back when I was dreaming of volunteering in retirement, literacy was always a field with which I wanted to be involved. I found a fantastic organization called "Read Aloud," whose mission is to not only prepare children for school and help them excel, but to actually foster a love of reading and books. Being a lifelong and avid reader, this was a mission that I could enthusiastically support.

About two months ago, I had an idea to do something special for "my kids" at the school. I started to buy children's books from Amazon in batches--focusing on books on sale when I could--to make my goal of giving every child I read to a book for Christmas. After checking with the school and with Read Aloud, I got the green light to make it happen.

The week before Christmas, I arrived with a big bag of books to my Monday afternoon class. I explained that, instead of reading to them, each child would get to choose from a selection of books as a gift from me. The kids couldn't believe it. "I can take this HOME with me?!?" many of them said as they made their choices. Their eyes got wide when I wrote each of their names in their book. "You're going to WRITE IN IT?!" they'd say in shock. "Yes," I'd answer, smiling, "because this is YOUR book to do whatever you want with." Their smiles said it all.

On Wednesday morning, I did it all again with my other class. The teacher gathered all the children with their books and took a picture of me with the class. As I was packing up to go, two little girls came up and gave me big hugs and said thank you. Maybe I gave a lot in dollars and books, but those two hugs and all the smiles in that picture were a priceless gift to me.

The joy of finding the right fit

No, I'm not talking about clothes shopping, although finding clothes that fit is pretty joyful too, especially when you are built like me (short and stout, like the teapot song). I'm talking about finding a job (volunteer in my case) that fits your skill set to the point where you gain quite a bit of enjoyment in doing the job.

For the last 20+ years of my 37-year Federal Government career, I was (in part) a reader and editor of technical material and a writer of technical documentation (not technical as in computers, but as in regulations). Reading and writing have been interests of mine for as long as I can remember; I was writing poems and short stories from at least the age of 12.

I retired from the Government last year (summer of 2008), moved to the beach, and and went in search of meaningful work as a volunteer. I figured that, after giving 37 years of my life to the Government, it was time for me to do something I really LIKED to do. But what? My initial thought was that I wanted to volunteer in the fields of literacy and animal welfare.

I began my search on Volunteer Match (http://www.volunteermatch.org/), a great website where you can plug in your zip code and some parameters about what kind of volunteering you want to do into its search engine, and it will spit out a list of potential volunteer jobs. The problem was that list I was given for my new zip code in Delaware was only a tiny fraction of the list I used to get when I lived in the Washington, D.C. area. However, via that website, I discovered the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) for the county in which I lived.

I met with one of the RSVP coordinators right after I retired; I wanted to start some kind of volunteer work right away to help me transition from being a full-time worker to a lady of leisure. It just so happened that the State Department of Social Services (DSS) needed help answering phones. It wasn't what I had in mind, but I figured it was something I could get started on right away and would be easy-peasy and not stressful. WRONG!

Despite the fact that working at DSS often made me miserable, I kept doing it for 11 months because I really enjoyed the people I worked with. In the meantime, though, I started some other projects--reading to preschool children at HeadStart through the Read Aloud program, doing occasional fundraising for the county's first no-kill animal sanctuary, and attending board meetings of an animal disaster assistance organization.

Finally, in the spring of 2009, when I was reaching the end of my rope at DSS, RSVP offered me a new gig--a new nonprofit organization was starting up in Delaware and they needed someone from my county to write articles, interview people, take pictures at events, etc. BINGO! Now we were talking!

I've been volunteering for Coming of Age Delaware (CoADE) for a few months now. I quit my DSS job to allow me to devote more time to it (okay, it gave me an excuse to quit). While it may not excite me greatly (CoADE hopes to inspire those over 50 to volunteer and do other community service), it is a good fit for my skill set and I'm really enjoying it. I've written five articles for their newsletter and website (http://www.de.comingofage.org/). Three of them have been published thus far, and the other ones should be published in the coming month.

It gives me a thrill to have finally found a good fit. Maybe not the same kind of thrill as finding a pair of pants that can cope with both my ample posterier and my smaller waist, but a thrill indeed.

The joy of community

After being raised in a tiny 2-stoplight town in Ohio (where I knew almost everyone), I spent 37 years of my life in a major metropolitan area--in and around Washington, D.C. For 32 of those years, I lived in a small, older family-owned apartment complex in Alexandria, Virginia. In 32 years, I never had a neighbor who invited me into their home, nor did I invite any of them into mine. In my last number of years there, there were two older ladies--one next door and one across the street--who were pretty much the only people who spoke to me. I only knew my next door neighbor's name because I regularly got her mail.

When I would go out walking in my complex, I would smile and say hello or good morning to everyone I passed. Many people didn't even acknowledge me much less return my greeting or smile at me. This angered me. I thought--what is so hard about just smiling or saying hello? Why would you NOT? I never understood it and, while I enjoyed the area, it made me sad not to feel a sense of community in a place where I had spent more than 3 decades of my life.

Last year, I retired and moved to a small beach town on the Eastern Shore. My best friends had lived there for 20 years and I had visited regularly over the years. I called it my home away from home. During the years when my job and its attendant stress were taking a toll on me, this town and my friends' home was my escape and asylum from the madness.

I now live in a small condo community. Thus far (we are a new community), it is an all-adult community and predominately over 50, with perhaps 35% full-timers and 65% weekenders. For the first 6 months or so I lived here, I was the only full-timer in my building and only 1 of 3 or so full-timers in the entire community. There were moments when I thought "Here we go again." and wondered if I would ever feel the sense of community that I had hoped for; but, as more units sold, I got more neighbors--mostly weekenders but some more full-timers too.

Not quite 1 1/2 years after moving here, I finally feel that sense of community that I had craved. I love my neighbors! They are such wonderful people. I adopted a puppy last fall and the community has turned into a major "dog town." I have met most of the community before they even moved in, thanks to walking my VERY cute dog and living near the sales office. :)

I'm involved, via volunteering, with animal welfare, childhood literacy, human welfare and the over 50 population, which further gives me that sense of community--of being OF and doing FOR--and I am the happiest I have been in many, many years. When I walk my dog in this development and the next development over, people wave. Some come over to talk to me and pet Missy. I am meeting new people all the time. My dog has her community of pup pals too. :)

Change was a long time comin' as the song says...but it was well worth the wait.